In case you didn't quite get what all the singing and dancing was about, it's an ad for something called a "vaginal rejuvenation" gel called 18 Again. The product website claims that:
"18 Again is very effective for tightening of the vagina. Along with tightening, it provides vaginal rejuvenation, improves strength and grip of the vagina, helps prevent infections, encourages natural lubrication, masks foul odour, reduces involuntary urine escape, improves blood circulation, delays effects of ageing and keeps the vagina healthy."I have to say that this is perhaps the weirdest commercial product I've run into since the crotch-bleach stuff (which was also an Indian thing...is something going on in Mumbai that I'm just not getting..?) and the damn adult wet-wipes that got your beaver more wood or something.
I mean, thinking about this in a sort of cold-bloodedly sexual fashion I get how the whole "happiness is a tight pussy" pitch these people are making for their product could work. It plays into the human obsession with sex and bizarre ways to make it bigger, faster, harder, and better. When you think about it this gloop isn't all that much different from the old Johnnie Holmes pecker-pump gimmicks you used to see advertised in skin mags or skeevy scandal sheets.
Not to mention the subject of a gajillion jokes like the one I used for the title that got ol' Earl Butz canned.
(And just as an aside, now there was a deeply evil Republican bastard. We'll get back to him in a bit, I promise...)I can see how people would buy this stuff.
But below the surface there just seems to be something deeply...wrong...about the whole idea of this goop and I can't quite put my finger on it.
Is it simply the usual lazy human nonsense of expecting a magic cream to do magic to your body instead of hard work? Buying a magic belt instead of sit-ups? Buying magic pills instead of laying off the cupcakes? Buying magic goop instead of patiently doing a whole bunch of Kegel exercises?
Or is it the other usual lazy human nonsense, the masculine nonsense of treating a woman like a product that has a sell-by date and is useless after that, worthless until she's "eighteen again", tight and taut and virginal?
I don't know which is sadder.
But I know the whole business makes me shake my head just like the ginzo-bleach and the dingus-wipes.
Sometime I think human beings are the strangest goddamn monkey on the whole goddamn island.
Sapiens, my ass.
As Sharon Astyk points out, there are 7.5 billion people in the world, most of them unemployed. Yet we treat human labor as something as precious as platinum.
ReplyDeleteHumans ARE the weirdest animals on the island! The message is age-old: Women are (mostly) pleasure models, their usefulness to be maximized. The younger the better to make fat, balding middle-aged men feel like Ferraris again -- if, indeed, they ever were. Mostly, I'm thinking Pintos or Novas.
ReplyDeleteWe have evolved enough, or are sneaky and self-deluded enough, to close our eyes and take the fake slickness for arousal, and Viola! I am really hot without having to learn about foreplay, and my (older) babe is not so pathetic.
'Tis sad, but it's where we are. Oh, and we call it progress. Better living through science, y'know?
And yes, another vote for a fountain of SMART...since we have plenty of (callow) youth.
ReplyDeletePaul: Well, for the people involved it sort of is; I've always been frustrated that the notion that someone who wants to and can work can't find it.
ReplyDeleteBut there's also the deal that some kinds of skilled work IS difficult to do, and requires skills that have to be learned. So the people that can do it are fairly valuable.
But, sadly, "people" in general are the least expensive and most disposable of tools.
Lisa: I think it does sort of cut both ways a little. You are supposed to be sleek, taut, and virginal. But we're supposed to be wealthy, virile, and handsome (or at least VERY wealthy, which is a sort of handsome-by-proxy available to fat, balding middle-aged guys...) and decorated with ginormous, indefatigable erections.
I wonder if this 18 Again goop is a sort of carnal Tang, a sexual Barcalounger; another aspect of our conviction that we can engineer our way out of life's and Nature's inconvenient insistence that there is no eternal Youth and unflagging vigor and problems we can't overcome.
People, most of us, seem convinced that we're all speshul snowflakes, that our own wonderfully marvelous unique individuality can overcome anything so long as we just do...something. Work harder. Pray longer. Smear the inside of our vaginas with magical tightening goop.
This stuff seems like it fits in well with - not so much progress - but the same old-same old sort of magical thinking that imagined Aphrodite's magical bath that restored her virginity every time she washed her butt.
We ARE pretty goofy, neh?
Goofy, yes, and human, all too ... vain.
ReplyDeleteFDC says,
But we're supposed to be wealthy, virile, and handsome (or at least VERY wealthy, which is a sort of handsome-by-proxy available to fat, balding middle-aged guys...) and decorated with ginormous, indefatigable erections
I shall challenge this, a tad. Yes, money is handsomeness-by-proxy, but, a lot of women are not seeking the huge erections; no, that is a male fixation. Too big in fact is painful, and like Goldilocks, there is a "just right" for everyone, and that encompasses a large range.
But many women are tired of the men-playing-porn-god or expecting her to play a "goddess". If there cannot be any actual, consensual intimacy, then they'd rather sit at home eating Ben-and-Jerry's (ice cream, that is) and wearing big white undies.
Alas, we so badly misconstrue each other.
Lisa: What I was thinking of was the "commercial" image of the man-stud as the counterpart of the eternally virginal, tautly-young woman-houri.
ReplyDeleteNo question but that the entire notion of being rutted by a lover attached to a railroad-engine-piston-like erection seems to be something that I suspect most women with any commonsense would find fatiguing at best and frightening at worst. But I think that it's the counterpart of the cartoon of you as the virgin bride attached to the instantly-lubricious, constantly-ravenous insatiable maw (ewww! I squicked myself out with that little image...)
The funny thing is that I think that if you forced us guys to admit what we found enjoyable we'd admit that the notion of sharing that ice cream and tickling you gently under those cotton scanties quite pleasureable; the business of actually making love to a real person (as opposed to the cartoon of all of this tight/inflated friction) is the feel of the skin behind their ear, the taste of their skin when it's warm from the sun, the sound of their sigh as they settle on your chest, and the sight of the little fold at the corner of their mouth as they turn their head to kiss you.
Mind you, the sex is nice, too.
But all the other little intimacies are very personal. They change with all of us, with each of us, they are ephemeral and individual and can't be packaged or sold in bulk.
So we're left with the commerce in "vaginal rejuvenation" goop and penis pumps.
I think what's sad is that most of us when we're young only know that part; we buy into the whole commercial show. That, to me, is the worst part. Those of us emotionally old enough to have learned from experience might not be kidded. But young men and women, and those not so young but callow enough to THINK like they were are going to be taken in by this shit and keep perpetuating it and foisting it on those around them...
This stuff, like lottery tickets and hair gel is an opportunity to buy a dream in exchange for a token quantity of cash.
ReplyDeleteIt is a highly successful marketing strategy and speaks volumes about the overall human condition.
However, it ranks pretty low on the malicious human quirk scale.
Ael: Agree completely. It's silly (and rather embarrassing in the "caught by your parents looking at porn" kind of way) but not harmful or hurtful. The fact that some goof wants to (or her significant other wants her to) slather this goop all up inside the hot notch of her crotch neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
ReplyDeleteIt DOES say something rather uncomplimentary about human beings, but, then, Dresden, Katyn Forest and Bergen-Belsen say things so much worse as to make this almost adorable.
I just watched the ad. I'd say it was adorable if India didn't have such awful rape statistics...especially even of girls as young as five. Were those rapists looking for a nice tight virgin.
ReplyDeleteOverall, I have no sense of humor left on this kind of thing, the ad made me feel rather ill.
Labrys: The operative word was "almost adorable"...as compared to Buchenwald and Katyn Forest. So, no, it's not adorable at all. It's not mass murder, but it's nothing to be proud of, either - another of the sort of skeevy things we humans and especially us guys come up with when sex comes up...
ReplyDeleteI am always comforted by your descriptions of what most men might actually like, in contradiction to the limited production numbers the media/advertising provides us. As you say, true intimacy is a highly idiosyncratic affair, and is not replicable or marketable for any large profit.
ReplyDelete